London 2012 opening ceremony: Will we see hunt saboteurs and factory farms in Danny Boyle's rural idyll?

By Melissa Kite for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:49 GMT, 18 July 2012 | Updated: 18:31 GMT, 18 July 2012

This Olympic opening ceremony. Are we sure we want it to feature live horses, cows and sheep?

I’m just asking because there’s probably still time to scrap the whole idea and whip up a show featuring, oh, I don’t know, Morris dancers and football hooligans, say.

As things stand, an audience of 62,000 in the stadium in Stratford, east London, and one billion people watching worldwide, will see the arena turned into a meadow complete with grass, rivers and clouds that will rain down for the official opening of the Games.

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 Green and pleasant land: The Olympic stadium will be transformed into the English countryside for the July 27 opening ceremony

The London 2012 artistic director, Danny Boyle, a gritty film-maker normally, has turned the £27 million spectacular into a traditional view of the British countryside including live farmyard animals. Seventy sheep are involved, apparently.

We will see picnicking families, folks playing sports on village greens and farmers ‘tilling the soil’ - because that’s what farmers do, isn’t it?

Oh dear. Hypocrisy is never far away when metropolitan types start projecting their idealised view of the British countryside.

But this takes the organic, whole-wheat-grown-from-soil-that-was-tilled-by-hand biscuit. I am assuming - although I would be happy to be wrong - that Mr Boyle will not be featuring some of the more contemporary aspects of the English countryside, things that could really do with highlighting before a worldwide audience.

Realistic: Will Danny Boyle include hunt saboteurs and factory farms?

I don’t suppose a scene in which a hunt saboteur’s gyrocopter results in the death of an elderly hunt follower will feature very heavily.

Nor will Mr Boyle’s idealised meadow feature huge forbidding signs saying 'No galloping!' or 'Dogs on leads!'

Nor will there be any factory farms, or huge mechanised crop-dusting operations involving human excrement – that’s legal fertiliser for your organic food, by the way.

No, because these sorts of things are all the result of the townies’ impact on the countryside: the way they have changed it, purposefully or inadvertently, to suit their needs. And the townies would either rather not know about that at all, thank you very much or if they do, keep it under wraps.

The truth is the rural idyll being staged by Mr Boyle never existed. There is no such place where sheep and cows frolic happily in meadows and miraculously don’t have to die to end up on our plates.

The scandal is that lefties perpetuate these myths – glory in them at Olympic opening ceremonies - then expect country people to deliver their cut price beef and lamb and chicken and butter and eggs without doing anything to upset any animals, who should all live happily in meadows, if possible alongside foxes, who don’t need to be culled because they have learned to respect chickens and not rip them to shreds, possibly after having some sort of chicken-murdering-aversion therapy.

Incidentally, elsewhere in Mr Boyle’s show we will be able to enjoy a parade of NHS workers dancing around old-fashioned hospital beds.

Invitation: The ceremony will also include a parade of NHS nurses and hospital beds

That doesn’t happen either, in the real world, of course. But the organisers obviously think it’s a good idea to advertise our free healthcare system as particularly fantastic and salubrious whilst a worldwide audience is watching.

I’ll leave you to decide what the result of that will be.

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